note
hawtin
<p>
As long as the "spacer" characters are not alphabetic the task is, surely, simple:</p>
<code>
$input_str =~ s/\W+/ /g;
$db_str =~ s/\W+/ /g;
if(lc($input_str) eq lc($db_str))
...
</code>
<p>
Of course in the real case you will also want to remove spaces at the start and end of the string etc.</p><p>
In the production case this is a much more difficult problem
since you will also want to find:</p>
<code>
MaggieSmith
Magie Smythe
M Smith
Marge Smith
Maggie J Smith
etc
</code>
<p>
In a real case good name matching is not trivial and almost always needs fuzzy matching with some combination of [1408|Soundex], known alaises and clever processing. There is stuff about this in [287405|other nodes].</p>
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